The Strange Relationship between Transformational Leadership and Employee Safety

The relationship between transformational leadership and employees’ physical safety such as lower injury rates is well-established in research. As leaders show more inspirational, ethical, considerate, and stimulating leadership behaviours, the safety of employees and their co-workers improves: employees demonstrate greater safety behaviours and suffer fewer on-the-job injuries. Studies on this topic usually start with acknowledging the positive and linear relationship between transformational leadership and better safety.

However, researchers Tal Katz-Navon (The Interdisciplinary Centre, Herzliya, Israel), Ronit Kark (Bar-Ilan University, Israel & the University of Exeter Business School, UK), and Marianna Delegach (Sapir Academic College, Sderot, Israel) challenged this linear assumption, sharing their surprising findings in the recent issue of the Academy of Management Discoveries, an academic journal that specializes in publishing data-driven research that focuses on real-world problems rather than theoretical debates. Researchers publish their papers in this journal knowing that they will enter a dialogue with other researchers, who respond to the surprising findings via short commentaries. These commentaries often encourage the field to think about the surprising findings in a new way.

With four different studies using different methodologies, Katz-Navon and colleagues found a U-shaped relationship between transformational leadership and employee safety. Employee motivation to behave safely and measures of safety performance (e.g., safety compliance--following safety procedures and safety initiative--proactively contributing to improving safety) were higher and injury rates lower when leaders showed either very high or very low levels transformational leadership. Unexpectedly, safety decreased and injury rates increased when leaders showed moderate levels of transformational leadership.

As part of the dialogue on this rigorously-conducted set of studies, Olga Epitropaki (Durham Business School, UK) and Nick Turner (Haskayne School of Business, Canada) published a commentary on these findings. While acknowledging the contribution of these findings, Epitropaki and Turner invited readers to think about three questions:

1. Safety compliance and safety initiative are also referred to as safety performance in the research literature. Previous research on leadership and work performance shows that extreme levels of transformational leadership hurt employee performance. The findings from this study on employee safety show the opposite effect. How is safety performance different from other types of work performance?
2. Researchers use “neither transformational leadership nor lack of it” as a way to calculate moderate levels of transformational leadership in their experiments. Could moderate levels of transformational leadership be indeed showing a leader’s ambivalence?
3. In one of their studies, Katz-Navon and colleagues found that the U-shaped relationship between transformational leadership and injury rates existed only when employees had high levels of organizational commitment. What other factors could affect the shape and strength of this relationship?

This exchange between Katz-Navon et al. and Epitropaki and Turner offers food for thought for managers. While data show that moderate levels of transformational leadership can be unsafe for employees, there are many questions that need to be asked before putting this knowledge into practice.

References:

Epitropaki, O., & Turner, N. (2020). Commentary: Grey zones in leadership and safety. Comment on Katz-Navon, Kark and Delegach (2020). Academy of Management Discoveries, 6(1), 142-145.

Katz-Navon, T., Kark, R., & Delegach, M. (2020). Trapped in the middle: Challenging the linear approach to the relationship between leadership and safety. Academy of Management Discoveries, 6(1), 81-106.